Bookslut review of Wild Unrest

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I’ve just done my first review for popular American online literary magazine Bookslut. The review is of Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Aus, US, UK). I say:

‘Wild Unrest is refreshingly non-reductive, in that its author allows Gilman to be complex, to have a nature that is both loving and resistant, physical and intellectual, male and female. Horowitz shares evidence of Gilman’s deep affection for women without categorizing her in terms of today’s sexual dichotomies. She also places Gilman’s melancholic episodes in context, and provides a fascinating history behind terms like “hysteria,” “neurasthenia,” and famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure” … She is careful to note the effect of “time and place,” particularly as Gilman’s mental state was in its worst place when she felt trapped by her position and role as woman, in society and in her marriage.’